Brandon Olson won't be home to hunt deer this weekend, won't walk through the snow with his dad and his rifle, won't taste his mom's home-cooking.

Where Olson is there is no snow. No mom and dad. Bad food.

Pain.

A lot of pain.

Olson, a 2001 graduate of Hazen High School, was injured Saturday in an explosion in Mosul, Iraq. Shrapnel cut through his legs and put him in a hospital bed, struggling to fight an infection that might claim his right ankle and foot.

He had just been dropped off to patrol a sector of the town with a few other members of his Army unit, the 101st Airborne Division. Before the vehicle that left them had gone half a block, the world shook.

The driver turned the truck around and got Olson to a medic.

An "improvised explosive device," similar to a mine, had gone off. Shrapnel tore into both of Olson's legs, breaking his right one. Doctors inserted pins to stabilize it.

Spc. Olson called his parents from a tent in Mosul a few hours later. He told them as much as he could about what happened, which was very little.

Then, for two days, they heard nothing. They couldn't find him. On TV, Doug and Deb Olson saw there were two incidents in Mosul that morning. Two soldiers were dead, two injured.

On Monday, someone from North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan's office located Olson and put his parents in touch with him. He was suffering from a bad infection and fever in a hospital in Kuwait City. They were told he'd be transferred to Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany this morning.

Olson, 21, played football at Hazen High School, and loves to hunt and fish. He dropped out of Bismarck State College to join the Army after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"After that stuff started he told his mother and I he enlisted," Doug Olson said. "He enlisted because he wanted to go and do what he could. We're sure proud of him."

Olson has been in the Middle East with his unit for 10 months. He spent a lot of time on patrols, his father said.

Deb Olson said her son wanted to return to his unit, then eventually come back to North Dakota to go to college.

Olson was the second former Hazen resident to be injured this year in the war in Iraq.

Jason Frei, a 1990 Hazen High graduate, lost his right hand when his vehicle was shot with a rocket-propelled grenade in March. Frei is a captain in the Marines.

(Reach Tony Spilde at 250-8260 or tspilde@ndonline.com.)